Chris Parker is the Founder and President of infraTerra™, a company focused on wastewater pipeline intelligence and data-driven infrastructure solutions. With more than two decades of experience in the wastewater industry, he has worked with hundreds of municipalities and contractors to improve system performance and reduce infrastructure failures. Chris specializes in condition assessment, data integration, and strategies to address inflow and infiltration challenges in sewer systems. He is also an advocate for modernizing wastewater management through technology, education, and policy reform.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [2:20] Chris Parker discusses Florida’s 2,000-plus sewage spills and the push to visualize hidden wastewater data
- [5:04] The shift from reactive fixes to proactive, targeted sewer system strategies
- [7:05] Hurricanes, public outcry, and the turning point for wastewater reform in Florida
- [11:38] Chris’ background and early passion for wastewater infrastructure
- [17:35] How data visualization helped Hialeah restore compliance to 27 pump stations
- [26:07] Why infraTerra was created and the need for education across wastewater stakeholders
- [32:46] The first crucial step to reducing I&I in your system
In this episode…
America’s wastewater systems are facing a crisis, with frequent spills and aging infrastructure threatening public health, the environment, and city finances. In places like Florida, the sheer volume of sewage spills and the challenges of managing inflow and infiltration (I&I) have forced communities to reckon with the true state of their underground networks. What new strategies and technologies are helping cities turn the tide against these daunting problems?
Chris Parker’s answer points directly to visibility and strategy. As a wastewater infrastructure expert with decades of experience working alongside municipalities, he explains that the biggest barrier isn’t always funding — it’s fragmented, underutilized data. By combining condition assessments, flow monitoring, and GIS mapping into a single, visualized system, utilities can pinpoint exactly where infiltration and inflow issues originate and address them with precision. Chris emphasizes moving away from blanket rehabilitation approaches toward targeted interventions, including tackling private lateral lines that are often overlooked. Ultimately, better data integration leads to smarter decisions, reduced costs, and more resilient systems.
In this episode of Saving Our Sewers, Kwin Peterson hosts Chris Parker, Founder and President of infraTerra, to discuss how Florida’s combination of public pressure, legislative reform, and modern data tools is creating a new standard for sewer management. Chris talks about Florida’s surge in sewer spills, the shift to proactive infrastructure strategies, and how data visualization helped restore compliance to 27 pump stations.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quotable Moments:
- “The numbers are incredible. They’re daunting. And when you start to look back even further, beyond 2025, it gets into the billions of gallons of sewage spilled.”
- “It is not a singular community problem, and it is really a statewide issue.”
- “I think visualizing that data is key. Everybody learns differently and can gain through different concepts.”
- “There was always so much data siloed along the way, where you would have a community that had the best of intentions.”
- “The first thing is you have to understand what’s actually in the ground through some form of visual analysis.”
Action Steps:
- Build a complete inventory of your sewer system: Knowing exactly what assets exist is critical for making informed infrastructure decisions.
- Combine condition assessment with flow monitoring data: Integrating multiple data sources provides a clearer picture of where infiltration and inflow originate.
- Visualize data using GIS and mapping tools: Turning complex datasets into visual insights helps teams quickly identify problem areas and prioritize action.
- Shift from blanket repairs to targeted interventions: Focusing on specific problem zones improves efficiency and reduces unnecessary spending on widespread fixes.
- Address private lateral lines as part of the system: Tackling issues beyond the mainline is essential to fully reduce infiltration and prevent recurring sewer problems.
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by RH Borden, the leading service provider for innovative technologies that modernize wastewater collection system maintenance.
As Smart Cities evolve, RH Borden empowers communities to leverage data, optimize maintenance resources, and improve system performance. Their digital twin solutions help teams work more efficiently, minimize redundant maintenance, and pinpoint infrastructure issues with precision.
Learn more about how RH Borden is shaping the future of wastewater system management by visiting rhborden.com.
Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company
Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:03
The US Infrastructure Report card gives the nation’s wastewater systems a grade of D+. Welcome to the Saving Our Sewers podcast, where we feature the practices, tools, technology and ideas that will save our sewers. Let’s get into it.
Kwin Peterson: 00:19
Kwin Peterson here, host of the Saving Our Sewers podcast, where we feature city leaders, innovative engineers, and infrastructure experts who are shaping the future of rapidly growing municipalities through smarter sewers and data driven solutions. So welcome to another episode. Before we get started, I need to say that this episode is brought to you by RH Borden providing data driven approaches to wastewater collection system maintenance. RH Borden helps collection system operators bridge the gap in funding labor and other resources with technology that eliminates wasted cleaning and CCTV efforts, automates manhole management and dramatically reduces inflow and infiltration. Information about how RH Borden is shaping the future of wastewater.
Visit rhborden.com. And now I’m really excited to talk to our guest today. This is Chris Parker. He is the founder and president of infraTerra Incorporated, a wastewater pipeline intelligence and technology company. I think we’ve got a lot that we’re going to dig into on this one.
That’s kind of overlapping in what I do for a living. So I’m really looking forward to this. Chris has worked directly with more than 500 municipalities and contractors worldwide, helping them to navigate the full pipeline lifecycle from cleaning and condition assessment through rehabilitation. That work has spanned pipeline assessment, robotics, software rehabilitation services. It’s generated over $250 million in career revenue and given him a firsthand understanding of operational, financial and procurement challenges, both sides of the table face every day.
This is going to be an absolutely fantastic conversation with somebody who really knows his stuff, and I’m looking forward to it. Chris, thank you for joining us on the podcast.
Chris Parker: 02:10
No, thank you for having me. I look forward to talking with you today on all those topics you mentioned. It’s good to find somebody who shares the passion, especially on the inflow and infiltration side.
Kwin Peterson: 02:20
Well, we’re going to get to passion in a minute, but I got to start with the reason that we hooked up was over a LinkedIn post where you laid it out. Florida had almost 2000 separate spills of sewage in the year 2025, which is double the number here in California, which I thought there were a lot here in California. Tell us about this post, what prompted it, and what do you hope happens by surfacing these really fascinating bits of data?
Chris Parker: 02:53
Sure. Yeah. I think what happens often in Florida in particular, is a lot of people are aware of the challenges and all of the circumstances that surround the sanitary sewer overflows. But oftentimes it gets buried in, in a, in a, you know, a tight report in an Excel spreadsheet. And so really trying to shine the light that a lot of these communities are trying to do the right thing to mitigate some of their sanitary sewer overflows.
But the numbers are incredible. They’re daunting. And when you start to look back even further, beyond 2025, it gets into the billions of gallons of sewage, sewage, sewage spilled over the last 5 to 6 years. There is some correlation, of course, to wet weather events and hurricanes, but I think it’s really important for people to be able to see this data in a different fashion through visual means. It often gets presented in a large scale Excel spreadsheet that’s being deciphered by professional engineers.
Rightfully so. But to visualize this data and really understand that it is not a singular community problem, and it is really a state wide issue is incredibly important. So just trying to bring public awareness to this and the understanding that there needs to be more done at the state legislative level, the federal legislative level, and even local, so that it removes some of these roadblocks and boundaries that somewhat prohibit communities to really attack the root causation of infiltration inflow in Florida, which is often from that private side. Lateral.
Kwin Peterson: 04:26
Yeah, the numbers are so striking and seeing them presented as a heat map of size and frequency and location is just fascinating. You, you talked about, you know, through this, this is nobody’s it’s not a single system operator’s fault. And we know that this is systemic. This is why the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the infrastructure, wastewater infrastructure that D+ grade. It looks like Florida is getting better.
What are you seeing that’s happening there? And is that observation accurate?
Chris Parker: 05:04
Yeah, I think in a lot of ways it is improving. I mean, despite the publicity and some of my posts that might indicate that, you know, it’s a really daunting picture. Look, there’s still a large, large wall to climb. But I think a lot of these communities are trying to take more of a proactive approach to condition assessment. And I think a lot of this does stem from some of the recent legislation around collection system action plans.
That was something that went into effect in late 2023, and we’re supposed to be really seeing the first reports by the end of June, early July of this year that will require local utilities to submit kind of a full accounting of the infiltration and inflow that they face so that it can be more of a preventative, proactive approach towards these the sanitary sewer overflows that these local communities face. So I think it’s a combination of we have a new generation, if you will, of utility directors and assistant utility directors and engineering groups really applying somewhat different methodology instead of just a blanket approach of let’s go rehabilitate and do mainline lining basin wide. It’s starting to be more of a true, you know, special ops, if you will, you know, systemic approach to find where this infiltration is really occurring. Let’s conquer that in mass in those particular areas. And I think we’re seeing the net benefit now of that throughout all of these communities.
But it really has to start from the state down. If the state does not implement the right procedures and the right policies, it’s going to be hard for these local utilities to pass that up. It often comes to a local jurisdiction, and then the politics of the local environment come to play in that.
Kwin Peterson: 06:48
Yeah. You know, the southeast United States. From what we’ve seen, where we’re sitting here at RH Borden, the regulatory structures are not very aggressive in those states. What was it that drove Florida to start taking action on this?
Chris Parker: 07:05
I think there was a lot of public outcry in the last two hurricane cycles. There was so much publicity and publication around, you know, people that I remember there was an article, I think it was in the Tampa Bay area. Don’t quote me exactly on that. But I distinctly remember it was a mother saying, look, we were prepared for the rain. We were prepared for the wind.
What we were not prepared for was sewage floating inside of our home. I was not prepared to have my nine year old’s toys, you know, covered in things that cannot be recoverable. And so I think that was really eye opening for common members of the public that often, you know, they flush their toilet and they really don’t know what happens after that. So I really think that it shined a light on some of these problems to where, you know, how many 1 in 100 year storms can you have in one year? And I think that’s something we all continue to talk about here in Florida is that, you know, we’ve had a lot of 100 year storms.
And so at some point in time, you really have to start looking at that. And so that all of the, the media and the press and the publicity around those last two hurricane cycles, that really caused some detrimental effects, Hurricane Milton and some others even going back to Hurricane Ian, you know, just the the fallout from that, the press from that, I think was really a catalyst moment. And that is ultimately what drives the FDP in particular to move forward towards some of these collection system action plan approaches.
Kwin Peterson: 08:38
Well that’s great. You have mentioned how Florida is known obviously for its beaches. People come from around the world to sit in the white sands of Florida and how those have been affected by sewer spills. Did that play a role in what’s going on there in Florida?
Chris Parker: 08:59
I think so to a degree. I mean, if you look at Florida being that there is no property tax in the state, a lot of our revenue is generated from tourist activities, from people traveling here all over the world. And so it’s a pretty detrimental thing to have people travel here, not be able to access the beaches that they came to visit or be told that, hey, you can go sit on the beach, but you can’t swim in the water and see a sign that says, you know, warning, you know, raw sewage do not enter. You know, that’s definitely off putting for both the local community and travelers alike. And so I do think people are starting to understand that it is a more global effect.
And you do see some predominant areas across the state where just this year, for example, there’s already been close to 500 spills, 427 spills just in 2026. 85 of those. So a good chunk of it has been in coastal communities and most notably up around the Clearwater and Pinellas County region, directly tying again to the beaches, to the local waterways. So that environmental impact, I think people are becoming more and more aware that it’s not simply you have a sewage overflow in the street and there’s no side effect to that. So anyway, yeah, I think there’s a lot of awareness around the environmental impacts.
And one thing that we haven’t talked about is that there has been an interesting correlation. If you were to overlay the Florida Department of Environmental Protection map on sanitary sewer overflows and the Department of Health map on increases in gastrointestinal illnesses and things of that nature, there is a direct correlation to the communities that have these higher prevalence and frequencies of certain illnesses that directly overlay to where the most prevalent sewer spills are. So I’m making an assumption there. That’s not a verifiable thing, but I find it interesting that you can have two maps with the same hot spots. And so you would have to assume that there’s some correlation there as well.
Kwin Peterson: 11:01
Yeah, yeah, that’s a very interesting point. So I want to dig, we want to talk about what can be done to help operators improve their sewer system. But you’ve got a really interesting background and I want to dig into that a little bit just because I’m getting a lot of passion for you. I thought maybe it was because the beaches around my house are getting clogged by sewage, and maybe that’s part of it. But I always ask this, what got you into wastewater and why are you passionate about it?
Because no sixth grader I’ve ever met said, yeah, I want to work in wastewater when I grow up. Yeah. What’s your background?
Chris Parker: 11:38
That is very true. I was really born into it when, when I was born, my father was a TV operator for a municipality in Kentucky, Louisville, MSD. And so truly, from the moment I can recall, I was either exposed to a TV truck, around a TV truck, or in some form or fashion involved in that. And my father was involved when the Louisville sewer system exploded down in the trenches of recovering toxic waste that was dumped. And so it’s something even from a young age, I always saw the effects of decisions made by others and how that impacts the local community, how it impacts our health and the fact that, you know, we’re, you know, trying to be a leading nation.
And sometimes our wastewater system is not exactly up to par with that. And so, again, from a young age, always around it saw my father work in it and really gained a passion for it at a really young age and somewhat followed in his footsteps by going to work for an equipment manufacturer for a very long time. Both training equipment helped clients develop condition assessment programs from really the field level, and then eventually led me to a deeper understanding of rehabilitation of mainline sewers, lateral sewers. But what I constantly saw was this disconnect of data. There was always so much data siloed along the way, where you would have a community that had the best of intentions to develop a condition assessment program.
That data didn’t flow anywhere. That data, it was checking a box to say, yes, we did this task, but not really leveraging the data. So I think one of the things that I’m most proud of is showing communities how they can really leverage condition assessment data with other data sources from flow monitoring, etc., to use that data as power and move it away from the silo that it once was. And so, so yeah, that passion has existed from a very young age. And I guess I’m one of the rare ones that did see the passion early to be playing the sewers, so to speak.
Kwin Peterson: 13:50
Well, good for you. We talk about data now. Our company that I work for is obviously built around data. We see the importance of it. Where are you seeing data in Florida and in these systems?
Where are you seeing it and where are you seeing it getting stuck? How, how would you recommend people look at data in a way that makes it useful?
Chris Parker: 14:14
Sure. Yeah. I think visualizing that data is key. Everybody, you know, learns differently and can gain through different concepts, of course, when they’re reviewing data. But for myself, I’m an extremely visual person.
So if you give me a 1000 line Excel spreadsheet, I’m going to get bored with that task for one. But for two, I’m going to have trouble comprehending that and understanding it. So I think for most communities, it’s understanding that it’s not a singular source of information that gives you that full picture. You need to combine that condition assessment data with proper mapping intelligence, understanding the historicals on those assets that are in the ground, and even going as far back as having an inventory. I cannot tell you how many communities we go to that do not have an accurate accounting of their pipeline network.
It’s not just as simple as, hey, we have a missing manhole. We didn’t know it was there. It’s much deeper than that to where they have no idea the amount of assets they have in the ground. They have no idea even where some of their pipes run. And so we’re already behind the eight ball.
When you have a community that might not even understand how many assets are in the ground, much less how do we go fix those assets. And so taking data from the majority of sources that are available, and I think with, you know, AI and different technologies that have come on the market lately. The ability to take data from multiple sources and combine that into one platform is becoming a lower cost item for most municipalities, especially the smaller ones that can now leverage that data in a visual format and really understand at a street level, hey, we have micro I and I problems in this community. We need to go about attacking it in this manner. So really visualizing that data at the community level, I think is incredibly important, but it starts by removing those barriers, barriers and removing those silos.
Where again, as I mentioned earlier, you’ve got a condition assessment residing in one basket. One more point on that. I remember working with a very large South Florida entity that their manhole inspections, their mainline inspections and their lateral inspections were in three different hard drives, three different systems. And so their condition assessment data to even talk together, much less GIS there. You know, CMS programs, their flow monitoring.
And so helping get all of that into one stratosphere, I think is incredibly important for these communities.
Kwin Peterson: 16:49
Have you got a story that you can share about the power of data visualization? I mean, I can just give you a moment to think about this. I remember going into a city that didn’t know how to spell GIS and coming in and putting up a map that says, okay, the red dots on this map are your problem. And it just opened, in this case, the board’s eyes to what was possible and what they had missed. And, that eye opening among the leadership was really the thing that allowed this particular district to start to make the changes that they needed to make.
Your specialty now is, it really appears to be about visualization. What power have you seen in visualization?
Chris Parker: 17:35
So it’s definitely incredibly powerful. One of the ones that come to mind for me would be the City of Hialeah. It’s a very large entity. Normally when people think about Hialeah, they assume that it’s a mid-size city. You know, not a lot of infrastructure.
But they’re actually the fifth largest city in Florida by population. They have an incredibly large wastewater infrastructure, and all of that feeds back into Miami-Dade County water and sewer. And so having compliance under Durham and having compliance to make sure that they don’t have pump station runtimes that are over ten hours per day and that they’re in compliance across the board has been extraordinarily challenging to a lot of entities that fall within Miami-Dade County, but specifically for Hialeah, they found themselves with with constant constant out of compliance across a multitude, dozens and dozens of of pump stations. And I think that, you know, through leadership there with the director and assistant director, they saw this opportunity to really make the city of Hialeah a beacon and not something of the laughingstock that it was once known as. And I think that’s something they would directly say to you is that, you know, Haley was always looked at as this kind of entity that was never in compliance.
And once those two gentlemen came on board and really started looking at how do we go about attacking this problem in a different fashion? And part of that was not siloing the data, developing programs, developing condition assessment programs and rehabilitation programs that had a strong visual element to it, both that was community facing, but they could also use internally. And so through that, through the use of data visualization and taking platforms like sewer AI, taking platforms like, you know, different R, D, I, and I programs and just the intelligence on the team there, putting all that together in a package to where we were able to use all that data, visualize it on GIS, and really develop robust rehabilitation plans that were rooted in factual data based on both their contractual rates and what that should result in in terms of infiltration, removal from the system, and what that should result in in terms of pump station run time and compliance. And so through those approaches, we were able to pretty much return almost 27 stations back into compliance and under a two year span. And so that’s something that the city has never done before.
That’s something that I don’t think any entity within the county has been able to achieve in such a quick span of time. And so that’s been an incredible story to see and be a part of with the director and assistant director there at the city. And they’re just moving further and further into 100% compliance by the day. And I think all of that speaks to saying things that I was talking about before. When they stepped into the role, they had a hard drive on a desk, you know.
That was it. That was their entire condition. The assessment program was a single hard drive. And engineering firms largely tell them, yeah, just go line the entire basin. And so I think it all ties back to the data visualization combined with a change in mindset that it needs to be a true targeted approach and not just a blanket approach at a basic level.
Kwin Peterson: 20:55
You know, so many places I’d love to go with that story about Hialeah. One of the things that I really like to do when I run into visionary directors, public works directors, wastewater superintendents, I love to give them a shout out. Do you think that they would mind getting called out for being a foreman for leading this great turnaround? I know.
Chris Parker: 21:16
I mean, look, I don’t think so.
Kwin Peterson: 21:17
Don’t want to do him or anything, but.
Chris Parker: 21:18
No, no, Kevin and Oscar, both of those guys are outstanding leaders, outstanding at what they do. You know, I think any utility would be honored to have them on their team. And I think both of them, you know, both of them come from the county side. And I think they saw really a challenge and an opportunity at Hialeah to create that beacon, create that example in which both of those gentlemen have really propelled in doing that. And so, you know, look, I think both of them would probably be honored to be on your podcast to talk about it from their side as well.
And really looking at it through that new lens.
Kwin Peterson: 21:55
Well that’s awesome. Yeah, it has somebody in the leadership position who’s ready to say, you know what, the status quo just doesn’t work anymore. It, it’s, it’s the only thing that’s going to turn us around. So yeah, great job to Kevin and Oscar. That’s awesome.
Yeah. Tell me about what you threw out these numbers. Now, most of the listeners on this are not from Florida. They don’t understand what 20 turning around 27 pump stations means. What was the practical implication?
What happened as a result of doing that?
Chris Parker: 22:30
Well, for them, what it meant was, you know, less fines from Durham rest, less regulatory compliance, more money that stays in the city’s account. But it also meant that, you know, the cost of what they’re spending on treatment went back into the Miami-Dade system. So they are a customer like any other Miami-Dade customer. And so all of the water that they were returning back to Miami-Dade, they’re getting charged for. So if a lot of that water is not needed, if a lot of that water that’s coming into the system is not true wastewater, that’s an extra cost to the city.
That’s extra cost out of their operating budget. That’s extra cost that couldn’t go back into other community programs or just into their reserve fund. And so it really is a matter of, of being a more, you know, pragmatic and practical approach to saving money through fixing the systemic issue. And it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of interesting to me when we start talking about saving money on the infiltration inflow, because time after time in Florida specifically, the answer is let’s fill let’s build another treatment plant. Let’s build a larger treatment facility.
Yes. And it always, you know, it grates me a little bit in that look, there is absolutely a time and a place for capacity expansion. There’s a huge influx of people coming to Florida. So it’s definitely something that is required. But you know, it’s a little bit like, you know, you got to cut on your arm.
And the answer is, if I’m going to, I’m going to make my leg bigger. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t make any logical sense whatsoever. So these plant expansions, billions at times go into these plant expansions. And it still is not fixing the systemic issue that’s happening at the field level. So yeah, saving money back into the city coffers and really mitigating the need to, you know, have negotiations with the county for better rate structures.
All of those things play into effect. Highly is just one example, of course, but yeah, all it means is that they’re running more efficiently, less regulatory fines, less spotlight on them in a bad context.
Kwin Peterson: 24:39
Yeah, it’s it has something that we’ve only become aware of in the circles that I run in, just in the last, maybe 12 to 18 months, about just how expensive I and I is, especially rain derived II, which we can do something about because it’s easy to find if it’s raining and the flows go up. Well, that’s RT II. But yeah, this can run into millions and tens of millions of dollars. And because the. It’s been the status quo for in some cases, I’ve got people I work with who have been their entire career of just dealing with I and I and let’s go line another 10,000ft of pipe this summer.
Yeah, the amount of money that is really being spent on me and I both just treating it and also on the extra infrastructure, the storage and the extra treatment capacity is astonishing. Now you’ve been running a company that deals with trenchless maintenance, and you’re shifting now to a company you’re calling in for a Terra, which, as I understand it, is really aimed at shining a spotlight on this data issue. Tell us why you are forming this company and what you hope it will bring to the table for the people in Florida.
Chris Parker: 26:07
Sure. So you know, the foundation behind infraTerra and really the about reason is that, you know, after for myself having two decades inside this industry in a in a life cycle long before that when I wasn’t allowed to work in the industry with my father, and just seeing the problems and the challenges that not just the communities face, but contractors face as well, all the way down to homeowners. There’s an incredible opportunity for education in the wastewater space to make people understand that even that homeowner who continues to flush the grease down the toilet to the contractor who’s involved in fixing it, to the municipality, who’s making the decision to fix it. All of it stems back to education. But at the foundational core of this, after being around all of the utilities, after being around all of the different trenchless techniques as it relates to rehabilitation, you know, for me, my passion is advising, you know, clients and clients is a very broad word for me in that very happy to go sit down with a contractor, look at their workflows, look at ways for them to be more efficient so that they can offer better services to the utilities and sitting down with the utilities so that they can better understand how to spend those budgetary dollars.
That ends back in a true ROI, all the way down to consumers who are buying pipe rehabilitation for their home, where they have cast iron pipes in their home. They have no clue what pipe rehabilitation is. And, you know, unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad actors in that space where it’s a general contractor, no plumbing license, and they attempt to go do pipe rehabilitation with no experience. And so what I really wanted to do with infraTerra is bring awareness through all three verticals. So both on the consumer and I’m sorry, on the consumer side, on the government contracting side and on the government side as well, so that everybody in space, everybody who needs to touch the piping infrastructure in our world can become better informed.
But at the core, passion, it does track back to infiltration and the impacts and going back to the torrential services that that I had been providing, it was heavily based on small diameter pipeline and that of laterals, because one of the core issues that we face as contractors and as municipalities is there’s actually shared interest to address the private lateral side. But what gets in the way is the red tape. And so I’ve been involved heavily in legislative efforts between Florida building code, you know, House and Senate, and trying to draft additional legislation that allows these communities to really move forward with addressing the private side of the lateral. At the end of the day, it’s going to affect the taxpayer community. It’s going to affect the municipality.
And so to put that back on, the homeowner is not really an appropriate response. And so really working through advocacy across all segments to just bring overall awareness to wastewater infrastructure.
Kwin Peterson: 29:18
Wow. That’s such a good message. I want to repeat that just a little bit because what happens in the wastewater industry is we have the mains and we have the lateral and never the two shall meet. Right? Yeah.
We’ve got some a lot of systems that have responsibility for the lower laterals, but the upper laterals, they, they don’t have anything. You know, it’s all one system. And the more I’m digging into I and I, the more I’m finding that it’s very often, very often the upper lateral that’s the problem. And the faster we can get to a point in our I and I fight of saying, you know, we got to look at the upper laterals as the part of the system that they are so absolutely on.
Chris Parker: 30:09
One, one point on that. And there are some communities that are really taking an outstanding approach. One of those that comes to mind is the City of Saint Pete. Eat. They have chosen to do a private lateral rebate program in certain areas of the community, where they will pay for a community member to go out and have their lateral replaced or rehabilitated, and it showed instantaneous results in I and I reduction in that community.
And that was their way of forgoing any type of city wide ordinance to get private property rights. That was their way to forego any delay in having that effect. But I think if other communities were to start to follow what the City of Saint Pete is doing, even Pinellas County and Brevard County have various ordinances as well. But addressing that private side is absolutely essential to truly mitigating a lot of these infiltration issues that we’re having.
Kwin Peterson: 31:05
Yeah, the numbers don’t lie. The numbers that you posted about there being over 24 million gallons of sewage, but it’s divided over 2000 spills. That tells us that there’s a lot of little spills, a lot happening there in the lateral space. Thanks for shining a light on that. You know, the biggest problem with getting anything done, it seems, is fighting the status quo.
So we’re going to wrap up with one question about that. But before we hit that one last question, where can people find out more about you and infraTerra? Chris.
Chris Parker: 31:47
Absolutely. So go to my website directly, which is InfraTerraInc. That’s, you know, minc.com or of course, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m heavily engaged in LinkedIn pretty much almost on a daily basis, but either of those locations will provide you access to me directly.
Kwin Peterson: 32:04
Okay. We’ll also have that in the show notes for this episode as well. All right. I like to ask one question of my guests as we wrap up, which is, you know, if you’re just starting your fight to improve your D plus scoring system, what advice would you give? And because you’re the Ini expert and you’ve identified this specific problem of lateral infiltration, maybe you can point to that as your last answer here.
If I’m running a system and I want to reduce my I and I, what’s the first thing you suggest I do about that?
Chris Parker: 32:46
I mean, the first thing is, know your system, right? I mean, the first thing is you have to understand what’s actually in the ground through some form of visual analysis or some type of condition assessment in combination with a robust flow monitoring program. That’s going to be the catalyst because it’s, it’s the whole premise about data, right? Garbage in, garbage out. And so I think a lot of these utilities are operating on very old sets of data that have not been modernized, much like it is in procurement, where we see a copy and paste from a 2008, you know, ITB that just got copied into a new one.
So I think truly getting a fresh set of data from a true ground level through condition assessment, flow monitoring, and then from there, combine that with GIS. Combine that with, you know, different analytics to understand if we make this decision, will it result in the end result that we’re looking for. Is it really going to lower our cost basis of that basin? Is it going to lower infiltration? So it all has to start with proper condition assessment.
Not just a standardized contractor inspection. It needs to be a true condition assessment to understand that pipeline infrastructure. And then from there you can really make highly highly informed decisions. But it has to be from a relevant new set of data, not something that was done in 2007 and trying to make informed decisions on.
Kwin Peterson: 34:16
That’s great. Wonderful advice. Chris, you’re a wealth of information. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. And to everybody listening, if you are struggling with bringing your sewer system up to date, if you’re frustrated and I know that most of you are, if you’re frustrated with where your system is at right now, take heart.
There are lots of great ideas out there, and there’s lots of ways that we can use technology now to get people into a position where they can go from reactive to proactive, as we have so often talked about on this podcast. So if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe so you can get future episodes. And as always, keep up the good work.
Outro: 35:02
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